What’s New
We’re dedicated to non-stop product innovation to meet our customers’ needs.
New Features
- Next Crawl Estimate: Fluxguard now displays an estimated time for when the next crawl of the session will occur. To find this, navigate to any session in Fluxguard, and in the navigation bar you will see “Next crawl est. [date and time]. This calculation is based on the “Last crawled” date along with the session frequency.
- Bulk Upload URLs: Subscribed users can now easily bulk upload URLs to Fluxguard. Access this feature from your dashboard by selecting the “Bulk Upload” button. Prepare a CSV file with the required headers and effortlessly add multiple sites at once.
- There is now the ability to see skipped and deleted pages in a session. Previously, users could only view newly found pages. Skipped pages are the pages deemed unrelated by AI harvesting while deleted pages were at some point manually deleted. You can reactivate or start monitoring these pages as desired.
- You can now adjust harvest settings at the account level in addition to the individual session level. This allows users to bulk adjust their harvesting across their sites/sessions. Navigate to Account Settings, then select Bulk Adjust to utilize this feature.
- When viewing changes in the text tab, there is now an option to view the two versions side by side.
- There is a new option in Team Settings to allow users to view captures and differences linked from notification emails without logging in.
- Duplicate Page Option: When this option is enabled, page URLs will be added even if they are already being monitored. If you would like to prevent duplicates, toggle this off.
- Auto Nesting: There is a new option to automatically nest primary domains (for example, fluxguard.com): If the option is on, primary domains will be automatically added to an existing site if they match.
- You can now cancel an ongoing crawl in the Session View. The ‘Start session crawl’ play button will change to a ‘Stop session crawl’ stop button during a crawl.
- You can now filter monitored domains by DNS status.
- Major feature alert: folder organization of sites. We’ve introduced folders to allow you to group sites. Our folder feature joins site categories as organizational structures for the increasingly complex monitoring portfolios and needs of our customers. Stay tuned for more folder-specific features in coming releases.
- When crawling a session, a check is done to verify that its domain resolves, and, if not, this failure will be noted rather than trying and failing to crawl every page.
- Major feature alert: Visual AI Analysis of Screenshots. Fluxguard AI can now summarize visual changes by using screenshots of changing webpage content. To use this, set the comparison type to visual and optionally adjust the AI prompts. Learn more.
- Major feature alert: AI-Guided Link Harvesting. You can now use AI to guide new URL discovery. This utilizes Fluxguard’s AI to assess monitoring suitability for discovered links on each monitored page. To enable, navigate to your Session Settings. Learn more.
- We have lowered the cost of Fluxguard AI—utilizing GPT-4—from 30 credits to 10.
- Major feature alert: AI-Powered Crawl Management. Embrace the next level of web change intelligence: Fluxguard AI now offers automated classification and crawl control, enriching management of complex site monitoring and data collection workflows. For example, utilize customized AI prompts to auto-flag new versions based on your business rules: a red flag for rule X, a green flag for rule Y. Learn more.
Other Recently Launched Features
- View tracking is now live. Fluxguard now indicates when you or a team member have viewed a change for a specific version. This is a great way to ensure you don’t miss any detected changes.
- We are happy to announce the launch of Fluxguard on Zapier. Start creating your Zaps today: https://zapier.com/apps/fluxguard/integrations.
- Word and Excel change monitoring is now live. We are excited to announce that Fluxguard now supports monitoring for XLSX, Word, and CSV files. Just add the URL of the file you wish to monitor and our platform will track and notify you of any changes.
- Customize the AI overview prompt. Fluxguard produces an AI overview in each email report to summarize cross-page changes. You can now tweak this prompt to your business needs.
- Trusted events are here. A new
window.fxgPopulateFormfunction can be used within executed Javascript to automate browser form submissions—learn more. - User Activity Log. All updates to user settings are now logged and available for review from the Fluxguard interface.
- More monitoring frequencies. We have added more options to tweak monitoring frequencies to better serve diverse customer needs.
- AI Overview. A new feature enables a summary of summaries in each email. This feature provides a high-level AI overview of all detected changes alerted in a single email.
- Data can be exported from a page crawl using JavaScript code execution that assigns to
window.fxgData.export— learn more. - Downloaded version spreadsheets can optionally include a column with excerpts of the text differences. This provides a powerful new way to explore and visualize changes with the tools you already use... Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.
- Fluxguard now includes AI filtering and summarization of Fluxguard-detected content changes on any web page. This reduces false positives by suppressing email alerts for inconsequential changes.
- Fluxguard AI can now opt to summarize the initial version of crawled pages. This offers exciting new options: you can utilize Fluxguard to crawl and summarize new links referenced from competitors’ sites, for example. Stay tuned for even more functionality with Fluxguard AI.
- Introducing AI Change Analysis. This is a breakthrough feature that accelerates insights from data.We utilize ML models to score changes to your specific business rules. From this, you can instruct Fluxguard to only alert you to changes that breach an AI score threshold. This transforms change monitoring as it reduces the need for brittle DOM-based filters. Instead, a model that reflects your business rules will score each new change, and only alarm those that are likely to be significant to your use case.This feature pairs Fluxguard change monitoring with our advances in AI scoring of new web-based content. Please contact us to discuss model training for your business use case.
- Accounts can now add multi-factor authentication. Configure in your Settings page.
- Fluxguard now offers pre-packaged Javascript recipe templates. These allow you to simplify the monitoring surface area by reducing analyzed content to the core minimum required for particular tasks, such as rank tracking.
- Alarms front-end is live. You will now find a new Advanced option under the Detect tab in Session Settings. You can now add specific tests that will trigger immediate alarms. These are a great complement to change monitoring, as they provide a new way to immediately alert defects or other issues that might not be caught by regular change monitoring. For example, alert when a privacy link is missing from any page. Or alarm when a certain DOM element makes an appearance.
- Alarms are live. We are really excited about a transformative new feature in Fluxguard. Alarms allow you to introduce tests, validations, and, well, alarms on any page. Insert Javascript tests, and use the following to immediately trigger a new version in Fluxguard:
window.fxgData.alarms = [{name: "My Alarm", value: "This alarm was triggered."}]We will soon roll out major new functionality that takes advantages of our alarms ecosystem. - ML-based change detection. You can now opt to leverage our best-of-breed machine learning to look for new (or removed) references to people, places, organizations, and more (including syntax).
A key issue with change monitoring is false-positives. These are legitimate changes, but ones that are not important for your use case. Now, you can now ameliorate irrelevant changes through “extracted term” change detection. This machine learning technique transforms walls of text into a categorization of referenced people, places, organizations, verbs, nouns, and so on. Customers can easily choose to opt in or out of changes to specific sets of these entities. For example, perhaps you only want to be alerted when a new person is added or removed from a monitored page. (Contact us for custom models specific to your use case.)
We now display spark charts to highlight changes for each category over the past 30 days. Categories are quickly becoming the secret weapon of Fluxguard. You will not get all their goodness until you add categories. But once you do, you are in for a treat with spark charts, heatmaps, and other ways to view your data.
Update: We added an ALL CATEGORIES display that presents cumulative metrics.
So many of our customers organize content and monitored sites by region. We now provide more powerful ways to visualize geo-based content. Add site categories with US state names (e.g., Oregon, California, New Mexico, and so on) and we will automatically add an interactive choropleth map. This will color code states by recent changes, and allow you to quickly locate state-level changes.
Monitoring for pixel changes is a powerful Fluxguard monitoring strategy. This technique identifies changes in screenshots between versions. This is a great way to capture visual changes that might have no corresponding text, HTML, or code-level alterations: for example, perhaps image sources change. Of course, false-positives can still transpire. Fluxguard offers a threshold to suppress alerts for changes that are less than a specific number of pixels.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) – a subfield of machine learning (ML) – is now part of Fluxguard. This effective technique extracts entities (such as people, places, locations, and more) from monitored pages. That, in turn, flips the script on change monitoring. Instead of creating brittle filters, customers can focus on monitoring, for example, changes to added or deleted entities, such as locations, people, and so on. Contact us to train a custom model for your business.
Fluxguard automates the discovery of new URL sources by extracting all newly found URLs from every crawled page. You can restrict harvesting to find only URLs with certain characters. For example, you might only look for pages with “press-release” in the URL. For larger sites, this reduces the total of discovered pages by focusing on relevant content types.
Discover the different ways to sort and organize Dashboard and Session views. The data is presented in tabular, card, and site-based stacked layouts. Each has different pros and cons... Albeit one will meet your requirements, for certain!
You can add arbitrary notes at the site, page, and capture levels. This provides better teammate coordination. Moreover, notes will be included in some email summaries. This lets you add commentary to other users. You can also rename sites and pages... After all, some page URLs aren’t obvious.
Fluxguard updates any API endpoint via webhooks. This means you can instruct Fluxguard to ping Slack, your back-end, or other API endpoints whenever a change is detected. This is perfect to better integrate our services into your existing product or workflow. Learn more.
We have ample experience delivering complex enterprise projects. We’ve been doing it for years. And we’ve formalized a few models to provide contours to these engagements.
These include proof-of-concept (POC) deliveries to bring real value to an organization while serving as a means to plan future phases.
As well, we’re adept at Managed Services engagements: here, we deliver ongoing operational assistance at any required level to setup and configure monitoring, provide bespoke reports, and operate monitoring with Fluxguard analyst support.
At the core, we realize what it takes to deliver sophisticated, cross-functional, multi-region enterprise deployments.Contact us for more details.
Many of our customers use Fluxguard for regulatory intelligence and compliance automation. This often means content monitoring of non-HTML sources, such as PDFs. Fluxguard will crawl, extract text, compare changes, visualize those changes in side-by-side and other comparison options, and send alerts.
Trigger alerts when any page has new, unknown, or non-whitelisted network activity. This is the perfect way to detect suspicious Javascript injection attacks or other techniques that improperly move PII to unauthorized third parties. We’ve also added a ton of whitelists and other options to ensure you only trigger relevant alerts. Learn more.
Many of our customers are teams that monitor 100s or 1000s of pages. This can make collaboration difficult. We’re laser-focused on improving our customers’ workflow. As such, you can flag captured versions. These flags are visible to other team members, and help you mark versions as having important changes.
When a new version of a monitored page is captured, we perform three types of change analysis: text, HTML, and visual change comparisons. These results will construct change report emails at once. Yet, what if you want to compare the current version with an even older version? Until today, you couldn’t. Now, a variety of on-demand comparison viewers to review changes between any two versions is available.
Fluxguard offers many ways to monitor changes to any website. However sometimes you may want to refine things with our Inclusion and Exclusion Filters, Network Blocks, Selector Ignores, Transforms, and other techniques. And that can be demanding when the monitored website isn’t changing frequently! No problem: we provide a new feature on the session level that “forces” a new version whenever that page is crawled. This is a great way to refine settings even if the underlying site isn’t changing.
Our Inclusion and Exclusion Filters are powerful ways to isolate key areas of a page. Indeed, you can set these on the session or page level, and they will exclude a targeted DOM element. Is a footer triggering false-positives? No problem, use a filter to ignore it.
But these filters can have subtle drawbacks: when you remove something from the DOM, it eliminates all impacts it has elsewhere on the page. For example, if you exclude all script tags, then no scripts will execute, and the page may not fully render.
“Selector Ignores” and “Selector Attribute Ignores” features are used by our HTML comparison feature. With a Selector Ignore, we will strip specific areas after capture but before doing an HTML comparison. This ensures the area still exists... It will not be taken into consideration when determining if a new version should be recorded. And Selector Attribute Ignores will instruct Fluxguard to disregard a specific attribute on a DOM element. For example, perhaps there is a class on a tag that is always changing with some session variable. You could use a filter to exclude it, yet this means you will also remove essential content from that tag. With a Selector Attribute Ignore, you isolate a tag’s attribute to dismiss.
Fluxguard’s filters are a great way to isolate key areas to monitor. Instead of inspecting an entire page (and all the redundant changes), you can instruct Fluxguard to only monitor certain areas. Until now, these filters have been on the “session” level. That means the same filter would apply to every page in the same session. This can be useful, as you can set up a single filter — perhaps to ignore the footer — and it will apply across all the pages. Although sometimes you need finesse on a particular page. Hence, we’re pleased to have extended the filter setup to the page level. Indeed, for any monitored page, you can set up custom filters for that page. Learn more.
Some competitors only preserve the HTML of a captured version. In our minds, that’s not enough! We not only preserve a full-height screenshot of the captured page, but we capture and save all images and styles with our rendered comparison viewers. In fact, instead of attempting to load images from the monitored site (after all, they may no longer exist), we store them in a permanent cache for the captured page. This means that you are guaranteed all of the assets that come with that page are also preserved.
Fluxguard offers text-only, HTML, and screenshot change comparisons. These 3 ways provide a lot of flexibility to explore detected changes.
Use our “rendered” comparison view to examine changes on a “live” side-by-side comparison of both versions. Indeed, we attempt to load and display changes within the context of a “live” version of the page when it was captured.
Some websites only display certain content browsing from a certain region of the world. For example, EU-specific pages may display when you crawl from France, Germany, or another EU country. With Fluxguard, we offer an extensive private proxy network for all your website change monitoring. Crawling from almost any city in the world!
False-positives can be tedious when it comes to website change monitoring. A false-positive is a legitimate change... but superfluous. For example, it might be a change of a date, a rotating banner ad, a sidebar that refreshes with new information, and so on.
Fluxguard provides many techniques to isolate areas to ignore (or prioritize). CSS selectors can be awkward if you’re not technically proficient.
Now we are pleased to provide Visual Selector. Use this tool as a point-and-click on the monitored site to specify areas to ignore or focus on.
Orchestrate Fluxguard to login to monitor content “behind logins.” And it’s not just logins: submit any forms and monitor the results! This is perfect to coordinate and oversee web transactions such as product ordering, account registration, and more.
A core feature of our product is DOM comparison. This can be arduous at times due to third-party Javascript that might inline hundreds of new CSS directives and DOM elements. Network Blocks allow you to use regular expressions to prevent the loading of an item. Learn more.
For every monitored site, you can select a primary change comparison to determine if we should flag a new version. When launched, Fluxguard has offered visual and HTML/code change alert triggers. One more is now included: text changes. Here’s a handy guide of the alerts we offer:
- Visual change: an alert when a pixel-level change occurs on the page. Great to monitor UI/UX and CSS changes.
- HTML change: an alert when a code-level change is identified. Great to detect breaking front-end code changes.
- Text change: we extract and compare the text content of a page. Great to monitor for defacement, editorial mischief, and more.